Following this thread. My Hostinger "instant" was 22 minutes last week. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe they fixed something? Paris datacenter, card payment.
The variance is wild. 22 minutes to 16 hours for same product. That's not a process, that's a dice roll.
This. I work in ops, this smells like queue depth + shift coverage. Business hours Vilnius = fast. Weekend night Vilnius = 16 hours. The "fraud check" is just the name of the queue.
If uma's 17:00 UTC was 20:00 Vilnius, then overnight. My 09:00 UTC was 12:00 Vilnius, 22 minutes. Pattern?
17:00 UTC = 20:00 Vilnius in May, yes. But hour 12 of my wait was 05:00 Vilnius, and they responded "approved, provisioning now" at that time. So someone was there, or automation finally triggered.
Adding time-of-order to my sheet. If pattern holds, EU business hours = fast, other times = lottery. But svendeal's 16h and Lite14's 11h need timestamps to confirm.
This thread already answered my original question. Escalation path ranking:
1. Discord mod (20m, svendeal)
2. Twitter/social (fast, lucgone)
3. Billing direct email (2-11h, Lite14, bluclear860)
4. Ticket system (6-16h, black hole)
5. Waiting patiently (infinite, cousin of ImpureCreek)
Status page is useless. Will note.
Trust No One. Port 22 open to the world? Bold strategy. But also: trust no "instant setup" without SLA. If it's not in the TOS with compensation, it's marketing fluff.
I checked Hostinger TOS. "Instant setup" appears on sales page, not in TOS. TOS says "we will make services available to you" with no time commitment. You have no recourse for 14 hours. They can call it instant and deliver in 2027, legally.
The status page is separate service with separate SLA, probably covers datacenter uptime not provisioning. Green for "we didn't blow up a datacenter today", not "your VM exists".
What about chargeback? 14 hours is not instant, that's false advertising. In EU at least.
In France, "publicité trompeuse" yes. But for 5€ VPS? Lawyer cost more than refund. And Hostinger knows this. They calculate that nobody will pursue.
I keep my Hostinger for small project, but I know now: instant is lie, support is lottery, social media is real support. C'est la vie. I go eat baguette now, this thread too long 😅
